On August 16, President Donald Trump posted an old photograph of himself and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns. The picture, taken during a meeting at the Demilitarized Zone in 2019, showed neither man smiling.
Hours later, Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim as one reason. Two days after that, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was pushing aides to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Kim as early as November, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China.
For a relationship that went cold after the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019, and that stayed cold through the first year and a half of the second Trump term, the sudden urgency raises an obvious question: why now?
The most direct answer is domestic politics. The war Trump launched against Iran remains unresolved (and unpopular), with no clear victory on the horizon. Shifting the story away from Iran carries real appeal – and a North Korea summit would definitely steal the spotlight, judging by the furor the mere idea of such a summit has generated.
A summit with Kim on the sidelines of the Shenzhen gathering would land roughly two weeks after the November 3 midterm elections. That would let Trump announce a foreign policy win in the making without voters being able to judge the actual results of the summit (which, going by past efforts, may well be disappointing).
The payoff looks less obvious from the vantage of Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un has little incentive to help rescue Trump from sliding approval numbers tied to the drawn-out Iran war.
And then there’s the South Korea factor. Trump’s annoyance with Seoul was on display in the social media post that announced the drawdown of the allies’ joint military exercises.
South Korea pledged $350 billion in investment as part of a tariff deal reached last year, and the rollout has lagged badly. Trump is reportedly frustrated with the slow pace of the investment; South Korea has even been described as the slowest negotiating partner the administration has dealt with. Bolstering Trump’s irritation are commercial disputes involving American companies and what he views as insufficient South Korean support for U.S. priorities.
That frustration played into the decision to cut back the drills. Trump framed the move as a both favor to Kim and a jab at Seoul over its refusal to help with the Iran war. He called the joint exercises “costly” and said they “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” toward North Korea, which he described as “unthreatening and respectful” during his time in office.
In light of Trump’s recent remarks, the decision to scale back joint exercises and the summit push send a message to Pyongyang that goes beyond nostalgia for the summit heyday of 2018-19. Trump is signaling that it can bypass Seoul and deal with North Korea directly, at a moment when the alliance with South Korea is already strained over money.
Kim has reason to welcome exactly that signal. North Korea would likely prefer engaging Washington and Tokyo while bypassing Seoul entirely, a strategy that would divide the allies and isolate South Korea much as Seoul once isolated Pyongyang by establishing ties with Moscow and Beijing at the end of the Cold War.
But unlike the 2018-19 summits, North Korea has a new precondition: its nuclear weapons are not up for negotiation. Pyongyang wants assurances that a Trump-Kim summit in 2026 would not discuss denuclearization.
In 2023, North Korea amended its constitution to make its nuclear arsenal a permanent basic law of the state, closing off denuclearization as a negotiating outcome. Kim said last September that he saw no reason to avoid dialogue with Washington if it dropped its denuclearization demand, but that he would never trade away the arsenal to escape sanctions.
The refusal has not discouraged Trump. On August 18, he told reporters at the Oval Office that Kim had in fact responded to his request for a conversation. “Kim jong Un has always treated me with great respect,” Trump said, adding,” I understand him. He understands me.”
The answer from Pyongyang came a day later and it was far cooler. Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of Kim Jong Un, said the reduced drills changed nothing and called their provocative character unaltered by a shorter schedule. She also denied that any direct communication between the two leaders had taken place.
The following day, North Korea launched about 10 short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea.
These signals from Pyongyang aren’t a full rejection of dialogue. Rather, North Korea is attempting to raise the price of reengagement. Kim stands to gain plenty: a peace declaration would let him claim a historic first. A formal end to the state of hostility or even fresh limits on South Korea-U.S. military drills would do much the same and Kim could likely secure those gains without touching his nuclear weapons.
A larger pattern may sit behind the individual moves. Trump has separately pursued a rapprochement with Russia over the war in Ukraine, at a moment when security cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea has sharply increased. A July report from The Foundation for Defense of Democracies documented more than 600 instances of cooperation between what it called the “axis of aggressors” between 2019 and 2025.
Whether a North Korea summit is meant to fit into a wider attempt to loosen that alignment, rather than stand as a separate and narrower bid for a foreign policy headline, remains unconfirmed. But the diplomatic trend has changed the foundations for any Kim-Trump summit.
North Korea has deepened military and economic ties with Russia through troop deployments and arms sales tied to the war in Ukraine. It has also maintained trade ties with China that have blunted the effect of United Nations sanctions. That alignment gives Kim far less reason to negotiate away the arsenal than he had in 2018, when sanctions were straining the North Korean economy.
To sum up: Trump is desperate for a diplomatic storyline that not’s about Iran. South Korea is behind on its promised investments. And Kim is looking to make the most of both trends – without budging on the one thing that Washington has always wanted most from North Korea. Whether any of it produces a third act to the Singapore and Hanoi summits will depend on decisions still to come in Pyongyang, Seoul, and Beijing.